Assassin’s Deed: My Stage Debut as President Donald Trump

Cast as President Donald Trump against a nefarious plot of international intrigue, something scarier than Kim Jong Un lurked backstage: the Trumpian hairpiece!

October 23, 2024 by Father Gordon MacRae

Disclaimer: The following post was first published at Beyond These Stone Walls in August, 2018. It should not be construed today as an endorsement of any political candidate, real or imagined, nor should it be seen as the promotion of any political party. It is simply about a memorable time in an otherwise strange and uneventful existence in the strangest of places.

Back in 2018, I was invited by a newly formed prison theater group to attend a rehearsal for its first stage production in the hope that I might write about it. I walked into the group an innocent bystander and walked out a cast member — THE cast member. This is that story, first presented midway in President Donald Trump’s first term in office.

The script was not written by me, a fact for which, as you will see, I am eternally grateful. It was rather a team effort from a group of creative prisoners who formed the Theater Group in which I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member. In light of more recent events, I am a bit wary about the play’s title. I do not have the power to change it, but it does serve as a reminder about the potential cost of democracy.

It is now our “BTSW Pre-election Special”. I hope it brings a much needed smile and perhaps even some laughter — though please, not in Kamala Harris style — at this otherwise tense and divisive time. I hope you enjoy this unforgettable plot.

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“With the road to Comicon littered with death, one thing is certain: Mom’s van will never be the same!”

Amanda Foreman had a stand-out column in The Wall Street Journal entitled, “Literature Behind Bars” (“Historically Speaking,” July 14-15, 2018). If you cannot view it without a subscription, here’s the gist. It’s a brief literary survey of the most profound prison writing spanning the centuries. “Prison writings are about suffering and endurance,” Ms. Foreman wrote. “The spirit remains free, even when the body is in bondage.” 

Ms. Foreman presented examples, some of which will be familiar to the readers of Beyond These Stone Walls. She wrote that “modern prison writing came into its own during the Reformation when large numbers of educated people were incarcerated as being enemies of the state.”

Saint Thomas More comes to mind, but Amanda Foreman cited another, the English poet Richard Lovelace. His poem, “To Althea from Prison” was composed in London’s Gatehouse prison in 1642. Today it graces “A Voice for the Voiceless,” a recent review of this blog:

“Stone walls do not a Prison make,
Nor iron bars a Cage.
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an Hermitage.
If I have freedom in my Love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above
Enjoy such Liberty.”

Prison writers who have endured the tests of both prison and time include Saint Paul whose Epistles to the Philippians and Colossians were written from prison around 62 AD. Others are Russian author and political prisoner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nazi-era Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, American Jesuit priest and Soviet prisoner, Father Walter Ciszek, South African Apartheid resistor, Nelson Mandela, and most recently the great George Cardinal Pell. As Amanda Foreman described,

“The tradition of prison literature as a source of hope and inspiration — for writers and readers alike — continues in our own time.”

Life Imitates Art

Even in the worst Soviet gulags, stories like the one I am about to tell emerged as prisoners discovered their creativity and used it to transcend walls of oppression and despair. I have encountered some amazing creativity in the place where I live. One young man whom I have known for a long time is Jim Parker, age 32. Sent to prison at 17, he is today devoted to atoning for his offense by turning tragedy into triumph.

While so many young prisoners descended into the lure of a prison gang culture, Jim took another path. He has earned Bachelors and Masters degrees in prison without a dime of taxpayer funds. He has mastered several musical instruments and has become an accomplished playwright and producer. His most recent production was a collaborative writing effort and one that was — there’s no other way to put it— either creative genius or bizarre chaos. I’ll let you decide!

Jim gathered six prisoner-writers to compose six short plays. He and the group then melded the six into a single script. While it was still untitled, Jim began to gather potential actors and stage hands to afternoon rehearsals in the prison gymnasium. As this endeavor grew over several months, I asked Jim if I could attend a rehearsal, interview some of the cast, and write about it.

Jim spoke with the cast and they were all in agreement. So he added me to the endeavor as “press agent.” I attended my first stage rehearsal in early March, 2018. While I was watching this amazing creation unfold, Jim said, “We haven’t found someone willing to play a lead character in the script.”

The entire cast stared at me. Jim played me like a fiddle (which is one of the instruments he has mastered). Defying my instinct to get up and flee, I made the fatal mistake of asking Jim the identity of the uncast character. Jim said, “We need an older articulate gentleman to play [are you sitting down?] President Donald Trump.”

Articulate? Gentleman? Putting the irony aside, I was thus drafted to play the Leader of the Free World in a political satire opposite Kim Jong Un of North Korea. This was by no means a partisan affair. All I could say was what President Trump himself might have said:

“This is going to be H-U-G-E! The best play E-V-E-R! We are going to make American drama GREAT again! We are going to transcend a wall, and the best part…? We are going to get North Korea to pay for it!”

“What was I thinking?” I asked myself later that night as I pondered facing two months of daily rehearsals in the prison gym after a full day at work in the prison law library where I studied up on how to defend myself if Donald Trump sued me for a shoddy portrayal. Then I was given a copy of the script — 37 pages of the most incomprehensible and outrageous plot I have ever encountered. “He only has a few lines,” Jim insisted.

Trump appeared twelve times throughout this play, delivered a multitude of speeches in typical Trumpian style and, in the end, saved the world. The photo below is of the entire cast and crew. I am in a dark shirt with Pornchai Moontri in the center and our friend, J.J. Jennings between us. Pornchai and J.J. were part of the construction crew that built the stage and props. After the photo begins a capsule summary of the plot with photos scattered throughout.

The Stage

Before production got underway, Joshua Budgett, an accomplished carpenter who lives with us, designed a magnificent stage. He put his degree in Engineering to work on the design. It was composed of twenty interlocking four-by-four sections that could be dismantled and stored for future productions. Josh Budgett’s stage design is a work of art that will last for decades.

All the wood for the stage was donated, and prisoners also donated their time to build the various components. Several prisoners, including our friend Pornchai Moontri, employed their prodigious woodworking skills to make the stage a reality.

In this scene, Joseph Lascaze, J.J. Jennings, and Darryll Bifano rehearse a scene on one of the stage’s 20 interlocking sections.

The Script

The production settled on a title: “Assassin’s Deed: Six Disks to Comicon.” It opens with Marty McQueen (Brian Taylor) and his friend, Steve, 20-something-year-old slackers and consummate nerds with plans to attend the massive Comicon Convention at the Los Angeles Civic Center. I asked my friend, Joseph Lascaze — who was Managing Director and an actor in the play — to describe Comicon for us:

“Comicon is a ginormous gathering of geeks, nerds, and hardcore comic book fans so they can live out their fantasies and wear tight spandexy costumes, and, for once in their lives, be the cool kids in the house if even for just a day.”

Sorry, Comicon fans. So much for a spirit of inclusivity! You might remember Joseph Lascaze from one of several appearances at Beyond These Stone Walls including, “Predator Police: The New Hampshire ‘Laurie List’ Bombshell.” Joseph was entirely out of his urban culture element in this play’s celebration of nerdhood, but he lent his considerable talents for both writing and direction.

Back to Marty and Steve. In the opening scene, Marty — played masterfully by Brian Taylor — is pleading with his Mom to let him and Steve borrow her 1994 Dodge Caravan to go to Comicon. “But Moooom!” Marty pleaded, “We’ve been planning this for mooooonths!”

In the photo below, Nick Sizemore (rear) and Kyle Buffum (front left) actually built a wooden model of a 1994 Dodge Caravan which ended up being a co-star in the play. Nick and Kyle are impressive guys. They were the creative anchors and the behind-the-scenes guys who got things done.

Nick Sizemore was Technical manager for the production while he and Kyle Buffum doubled as “stunt drivers” (They powered the van “Fred Flintstone style” while hidden unseen in its trunk). They also doubled as President Trump’s Secret Service protection detail in a number of scenes. You will easily spot them in suits and dark glasses in the cast photos. [They did a better job than the Secret Service performance in Butler, PA.] Kyle made the ultimate sacrifice. He cut his hair to make the Trumpian hairpiece. It’s not easy to see in the photos under Trump’s MAGA cap, but it’s there.

Credit: KCNA via Reuters

The Super-Hoopinator

The scene switches to North Korea and the home of reclusive dictator, Kim Jong Un. He announces to his generals that he has a nefarious plan for the control of all of Korea. He has developed a secret weapon — “The Super-Hoopinator” — which he plans to unleash upon an unsuspecting world. The Super-Hoopinator will transfer into Kim Jong Un all the skills of anyone who activates it.

Kim Jong’s nefarious plan begins with his challenge to then-South Korean President Moon Jae-Un for a one-on-one, winner-takes-all basketball game for the control of a united Korea. Just before the game, Kim Jong has a plan to invite his good friend, former American basketball star Dennis Rodman, to activate the Super-Hoopinator thus transferring into Kim Jong all Dennis Rodman’s basketball skills.

To hide this plan, Kim Jong embeds his Super-Hoopinator onto six Lord of the Rings DVDs. However, Michael Cootier (played by Donald Levesque) is an American conspiracy theorist and skilled computer hacker. He has hacked into Kim Jong’s security sites to discover and divert the plan.

Assisted by his friend, hacker, rapper, and double agent Freddy McCombes (Joseph Lascaze), Mike and Freddy hacked into the Lord of the Rings DVDs and reprogrammed the Super-Hoopinator device to instead activate in Kim Jong an incessant impulse to dance and wear a wedding dress. [Don’t blame me! I didn’t write this!]

President Trump and the Secret Service

The scene switches to the White House and the Oval Office. President Donald Trump is being briefed on a report from the intelligence communities who had a mole planted in Kim Jong’s house staff. They, too, have learned of Kim Jong’s nefarious plan. To catch Kim Jong in the act, the White House issues an invitation to meet in America.

However, Mike the Hacker has also set out to foil Kim Jong. When he remotely reprogrammed the DVDs containing the Super-Hoopinator, he also programmed a North Korean security site to ship them to six different locations in the United States. The disks end up in the homes of nerds, hackers, and Mike’s fellow conspiracy theorists all of whom are in Mom’s van on their way to the Comicon Convention.

Kim Jong Un and his security staff discover the missing DVDs and decipher Mike’s computer hack. They send out a team of four assassins who leave a cross-country body count in their desperation to find the DVDs. Meanwhile, Kim Jong heads to Los Angeles and Comicon with Dennis Rodman to put the plot back on schedule. Only now, Kim Jong has added a plot to use the Super-Hoopinator on all Americans who will become puppets under his control.

The White House also learns the plans for the DVDs. President Trump and the Secret Service head to Comicon to head off everyone else: Kim Jong, his team of assassins, and Mike and Freddy. In the scene below, President Trump and the Secret Service have the nerds and conspiracy theorist-hackers detained in one room.

Nerd Marty (Brian Taylor) is on the left in his Star Trek Comicon uniform with his phaser on stun. Hacker Mike (Donald Levesque) is on the far right disguised as Star Wars’ bounty hunter Boba Fett to fit in at Comicon. Double-agent Freddy (Joseph Lascaze) is seated to my right along with Kim Jong’s subdued assassins. I remember whispering to Joseph in this scene, “Some of our nerds are not acting!”

The Final Scene

President Trump and the hackers end up being jointly responsible for foiling Kim Jong and saving the world. When the Super-Hoopinator is unleashed, instead of defeating President Moon for control of all Korea, Kim Jong is transformed into a compulsive dancer in a wedding dress.

Trump announces that the world is safe for democracy once again, and in a final scene (below), he kicks off his 2020 presidential campaign with a rousing speech. The President exits the stage to a standing ovation from an exhausted crowd of 500 who spent the previous ninety minutes laughing uncontrollably.

In the real world, as this all played out on stage, President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un came to an historic agreement. However, this time it was President Trump who was thwarted. The cast and crew of Assassins Deed, Six Disks to Comicon now take full credit for settling the Korean crisis.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: If you are in the United States, please plan to cast your vote on November 5. Please do not let any amount of disillusionment cancel your voice in support of democracy. Please also share this post. You may also like these other “prison-based” posts from Father Gordon MacRae:

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Some Older Songs

Left Behind: In Prison for the Apocalypse

The Music of Eric Genuis Inspired Advent Hope

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Saint Michael the Archangel Contends with Satan Still

The innocent in prison live in an incubator of dark dreams and nightmares. A recent terror was a confrontation with an evil presence that evoked an Angelic Advocate.

September 25, 2024 by Fr Gordon J. MacRae

I have had my share of nightmares and dreamscapes as an unwilling guest of the State, but I have been hesitant to write about most of them. Our dreams reflect the reality of our conscious lives — both our hopes and our fears. Few of mine are worthy of note, but those few also feel a bit risky to write about. I am not certain that I want to let anyone wander willy-nilly into the chasms of my psyche, a place where even I do not wish to wander alone. It is not because there is anything nefarious to be found there. It is because people who do not have actual evidence to throw will weaponize just about anything to justify their causes. We have seen this at work most recently in the weaponized lawfare in our politics.

To wander “willy-nilly” is an interesting term. It comes from 17th Century New England, a time and place when concerns about the devil dominated the literature and thought of the period. The term is a derivative of “Will I, Nil I,” meaning, “whether I wish it or do not wish it.” That is really the essence of dreams. They enter our psyche through no conscious will of our own while everything in them reflects our perception of ourselves and our place in this world, “our hopes and fears o’er all the years.”

Most of our dreams are quickly forgotten. This has more to do with biology than the content of our dreams. They are experienced differently from other mental processes and are thus not encoded in memory in the same way as conscious experience. A minority of our dreams are frightening and unforgettable. I had one of those recently, and I cannot forget it despite wanting to. It haunts me still. So I will take the plunge and just narrate it without judging either its reality or its sanity. I can only assert that the dream is true.

What made this particular dream most unusual is that I was dreaming that I was asleep and having a dream within the dream. I know this is convoluted but bear with me. In the dream, I was awakened in the night by something unknown. I arose from my bunk and took a walk. I was walking through doors that my conscious mind knew to be always locked. This is, after all, a prison. Outside the locked doors on a walkway at the top of the four-story prison building where I live, I descended alone down the 52 stairs to the ground level. And it was night.

That last sentence is important, and I write it with foreboding. Those same words appeared in another post of mine that described the presence of the Evil One. In “Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light,” I wrote of the Gospel account of the betrayal by Judas Iscariot that led to the Crucifixion: “After eating the morsel, he went out. And it was night” (John 13:30). My awareness of night reveals the spiritual setting of my dream. To live in wrongful imprisonment is to live in perpetual night.

At the bottom of the 52 stairs are a few steel doors that are storage areas. They are always locked, but in the dream one door was ajar. As I approached it in the night it opened, and I stepped in. Outside was a hot summer night, but in this room I could see my breath even in the dark. The door slammed shut behind me leaving me in pitch blackness. The room was filled with castoff debris, and lurking among it in the far left corner was what I can only describe as sheer terror. I could feel it more than I could see it.

I could not flee, so I prepared to fight. “I am stronger than you,” I said boldly, but stupidly. We do not own the stupid things we say in dreams. In this one, those were the only words spoken, but they were not the only thoughts. I felt panicked terror from the Presence I was in. I felt this unseen thing overtake me in the dark, and I feared that my soul would be ripped from me. I invoked Saint Michael in the dream, and then I passed out.

The Devil’s Best Trick

And then I was again in my bunk in my cell on the top floor of the building. I was awake. Was I awake then too? I do not know. It took awhile for the terror to leave me. I looked at my alarm clock. It was just a little after 3:00 AM. I did not sleep again that night, and I did not want to be in the dark. So I went out of the cell into a day room. There are four prisoners who sleep out there due to overcrowding and a shortage of cells .I sat there until sunrise.

For the rest of the day and for many days to follow, the dream shadowed over me like a dark cloud. At the other end of that day, at mail call around 6:00 PM, I received my copy of The Wall Street Journal. I usually turn first to the Journal’s Editorial Page, a habit likely born from the fact that I was in it several times. The Journal has a daily, and prominent, book review on the top right of its main Opinion Page. On this day (May 28,2024) the Review was by Micah Mattix entitled, “In Search of the Unseen Evil.” It was a review of a book by Randall Sullivan entitled, “The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared.”

The review was thoughtful and considerate, and perhaps only slightly skeptical of the subject matter. After my experience of the early morning hours of that same day, I was not skeptical at all. But there are many other factors that diminish my skepticism about the existence of personified evil. The image on our Home Page, reproduced atop this post, makes that as clear as it can be.

Randall Sullivan is no stranger to the Catholic mystical. A previous book, The Miracle Detective (2004) is reported to have profoundly changed him. His current book cited above, opens with a question: “Does the Devil exist, or is he a figment of our imagination?” The second question follows: “If he is real, who or what are we describing when we refer to ‘the Devil’”? Sullivan concludes his book with a statement of personal conviction: “There is a Devil, a force of evil that human beings can best comprehend by personifying it. To acknowledge this, he says, is to throw open the door “the Devil hides behind.”

That certainly got my attention. I was stunned to read this in the WSJ on the same day as my haunting dream. Replaying the dream in my mind, one of my first thoughts was to wonder whether the location of the Evil entity — a “far left” corner — was actually a metaphor for a present trend in our culture. It is a trend I wrote about in my recent post (published just a week before my dream) “Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age.” There is a lot there that I imagine the Devil would prefer you and I did not ponder.

Today many people no longer believe in the Devil — Randall Sullivan gives it an uppercase “D” throughout — and many of those also no longer believe in God. This is a cultural phenomenon that the Devil finds most promising. It’s the theme of a psychological masterpiece by C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. I wrote of it in Holy Week this year in a post that I am certain the Devil would also prefer that you did not see. In his book, C.S. Lewis laid out the long, subtle descent upon which humans travail a slippery slope away from God:

“It does not matter how small sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge a man away from the Light and out into the Nothing... . Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

— The Screwtape Letters, p. 60-61

Getting you to look away by altering your belief system to discard his very existence is, as Randall Sullivan entitled his book, The Devil’s Best Trick. Don’t fall for it. We have seen the face of evil many times as it overtakes human beings lured to act on its behalf. Two recent and vivid examples are “Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: When God and Men Were Missing,” and Pornchai Moontri’s striking “Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand.”

Angelic Justice

I'm sorry if this gets a little weird, but at 3:00 AM on another dark night — this one in 2016 — I had a prequel to this mysterious dream. It was preceded by all manner of dark clouds gathering on the horizon of my life in a time of chaotic upheavals. It was early in the morning of October 2, 2016 the day the Church honors our Guardian Angels. Had I ever really believed in them? I do now.

In the dream, I found myself gazing out the small barred window in the prison cell in which I lived then with Pornchai “Max” Moontri. It was four years before his deportation to Thailand. A small stretch of sky was all that I could see beyond our cell window. There was an older man standing with me. I could see my friend, Max, fast asleep in his upper bunk. The older man was eerily familiar and someone I felt I knew, but in recalling the dream I could not recall what he looked like.

He pointed to the sky and asked,“What do you see?” I replied, “I see only the prison lights.” “Look beyond the prison lights,” said the Guardian. Then in the dream my vision suddenly changed. I was able to see far, far into the vast darkness, and there in the center of my field of view I saw a constellation, a triangle of three stars. Within the triangle, the stars were joined by streams of glowing light connecting them. “It looks like neon,” I said stupidly in the dream. And again, we do not own the stupid things we say in dreams. Then the Guardian said just one sentence before departing my dream: “Michael dwells within the light.”

I stood there for a long time, mesmerized by this vision. Then I awoke in my bunk. It was very dark. I got up and walked to the window wondering whether it was a dream or real. I saw only the invasive prison lights, but I have since learned to look beyond them. I could not forget the simple statement that “Michael dwells within the light.”

Later that morning, I called a friend. I was embarrassed to relate the dream, but I asked her to search an astronomy database to see if a triangular constellation actually exists. This was what was sent to me:

“1998 — The Most Distant Object Yet Discovered: Astronomers have stumbled upon the most distant galaxy ever found, an object 12.2 billion light-years from Earth. It was announced on March 12, 1998. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. A light year is thus a distance of 5. 6 trillion miles. [It’ s a difficult calculation, but the distance of this object in miles is 12.2 billion times 5.6 trillion. Good luck with the math!]

"A team of scientists led by astrophysicist Arjuna Dey of Johns Hopkins University was analyzing the light from a distant galaxy inside the Constellation Triangulum when the team noticed the spectral signature of a faint and far more distant galaxy at its center. By taking longer exposures with the Keck-II telescope they were able to identify the new galaxy as being 90 million light- years farther than the previous most distant galaxy ever before discovered. They dubbed this discovery, ‘RD1.’

“Based on knowledge that the universe is approximately 13 billion years old, [knowledge first discovered by famed physicist and mathematician, Father George Lemaitre] Galaxy RD1 was formed soon after the Big Bang gave birth to the Cosmos. By studying it, astronomers hope to learn how and when the earliest galaxies formed. Little is currently known about these early galaxies. A report on the discovery was accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.”

This, of course, rocked my world. You might recall from our post, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang,” co-written by me and Oxford priest-physicist Father Andrew Pinsent, that the Church and science are on the same page about the origin of the Universe born in an instant, “out of nothing.”

In the early Fifth Century, Saint Augustine proposed that in the Genesis account of Creation, God’s declaration, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3) was the moment the angels were created. In the next verse (Genesis 1:4), “God separated the light from the darkness.” For Saint Augustine, this was the moment the angels fell and were driven from Heaven by Saint Michael in the battle of the Heavenly Hosts. Is this all metaphor or is it real? On a spiritual level it is very real.

This all left me with a profound sense that our stories are not just our own, nor are dreams or our struggles or pain. We are individuals, but we are also a collective part of an immense tapestry God has woven toward a specific end. And within the threads, we can find allies. I could no longer face the darkness without them.

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From The Prayer of Saint Pope Leo XIII against Apostate Angels :

“Most Glorious Prince of the Heavenly armies, Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in our battle against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the spirits of wickedness. Come to the aid of man whom God has created to His likeness, and who He has redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of the devil. Holy Church venerates you as her guardian and protector. To you the Lord has entrusted the souls of the redeemed to be led into heaven. Pray therefore the God of peace to crush Satan beneath our feet, that he may no longer hold us captive and do injury to the Church. Offer our prayers to the Most High, that without delay they may draw His mercy down upon us. Take hold of the dragon, the ancient serpent which is the devil and Satan. Bind him and cast him into the abyss so that he may no longer seduce the nations.”

— An Excerpt from the Prayer of St. Pope Leo XIII, 1878-1903

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. We hope you will also visit these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls. And please subscribe if you have not already done so. It’s free, and we usually only haunt your inbox once per week.

A Devil in the Desert for the Last Temptation of Christ

Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light

Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed

Michael, Gabriel, Raphael: Allies in Spiritual Battle

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A Special Note to Our Readers :

Thank you for your readership and support of this blog. As annual fees become due, Father Gordon could use your help if willing and able. Additionally, we have been notified that the National Center for Reason and Justice is ceasing operations after over two decades of sponsorship of the defense of Father MacRae and other wrongfully convicted.

It is imperative for us that the National Center for Reason and Justice website at NCRJ.org remain in place. It contains volumes of crucial critical legal information on the Father MacRae case and must be preserved for the time being. We have been granted permission from the NCRJ to continue to maintain its website. Doing so will add to our annual operating expenses. If readers are able to help, it would be greatly appreciated.

Please see Contact and How to Help.

Thank you. May the Lord Bless you and keep you .

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Unjustly in Prison for 30 Years: A Collision of Fury and Faith

From opposite ends of the world Pornchai Moontri and Fr Gordon MacRae share thoughts on a dark milestone: Thirty years wrongly in prison on the Day of Padre Pio.

September 18, 2024 by Pornchai ‘Max’ Moontri and Fr Gordon MacRae

HERE’S MAX

On September 8, 2020, I left my best friend, Father-G, inside the walls of New Hampshire State Prison where we spent the previous 15 years as cell mates. The term, “cell mates” might seem foreign to you. Having to share a space of about 60 square feet around the clock with another human being can be like torture. The daily drama of cell mates thrown together but never able to live together was the all-day every-day prime time drama of our prison.

I was an angry young man with a very short fuse which caused me to spend most of my prior years in prison in solitary confinement beginning at age 18. I was not very sociable. I trusted no one, and least of all could I trust a priest convicted of the very crimes that tormented my life and set me on a road to destruction. We went through a lot in those years, and over time I came to know with total certainty that this priest was a victim of false witness and a Catholic witch hunt. He became my best friend and the person I trust most in this world. We became each other’s family.

I know in my heart that I would not be free today — physically, mentally, or spiritually — if Father-G had not been present in my life. I wake up each day now on the other side of those stone walls of prison and on the other side of the world from where Father-G lives in captivity still. I now live in Thailand, a land I was taken from at age 11 for someone else’s dark agenda. It is a land I thought I would never see again. I am here today, and free, only because of God and His servant, Father-G.

The day this little introduction appears with Father-G’s post is September 18. It anticipates the September 23rd date on which he was sent to prison thirty years ago in 1994. There was no truth or justice in it. None at all! That is also the date that one of our Patron Saints was freed from another kind of bondage — a bondage that has been a grace for millions of souls. Father-G once described the heroic virtue of the life Padre Pio lived ...

“A half century bearing the wounds of Jesus — all of them, including false witness, rejection, ridicule, public shaming, and the crucifixion of his body and his priesthood, sometimes even by the very Church he served.”

With some help from Dilia, our Editor, I wrote a whole post about this day, about Father-G, and about the sacrifices he made that restored my life and freedom, and saved my soul. I would trade them back to restore his freedom, but he will have none of that. He said that sacrifice is sacred and it is not refundable. I hope you will read my post for it is very important to me. It is my tribute to hope from a time when all mine was stolen from me so Father-G sacrificed his. It is “On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized.”

Now here, from our prison cell thousands of miles away from where I wake up each day in freedom, is Father-G:

Parallax Views and Inflection Points

On the night before starting my part of this post, I called my friend, Pornchai-Max in Thailand. He asked me how I feel about approaching a 30th year in prison for crimes that never took place. I spent much of that night rehearsing in my mind a long angry rant. How could intense anger not be part of the equation of how I face the injustice, corruption, a cover-up by police and prosecutors and lawyers and judges who heard and ruled on their corruption in secret? How could I feel anything but fury for the people who profited from it all? In the fictitious case against me alone, a million dollars changed hands.

If you have been following publications by Dorothy Rabinowitz, Claire Best, Ryan MacDonald, and a few others over recent years then you are already familiar with all this and there is no need for me to waste your time ranting about it. It would indeed be a waste of my time and yours.

I thank my friend, Max, for his part in this post, and in this story. He and our editor, Dilia E. Rodríguez, have conspired to point me toward a parallax view. That’s a scientific term for what happens when an event or series of events is observed from a new position or angle with insights that were limited or unavailable before. In his introduction, Max mentioned a post he wrote with Dilia’s help just after his return to Thailand in 2020. It is linked at the very end of his Introduction and again at the end of this post. It is very important, and it is my parallax view.

And in recent weeks in these pages, Dilia E. Rodríguez wrote “From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor.” It, too, presents a parallax view, a summary of these 30 painful years in this abomination of unjust imprisonment. Dilia’s conclusion was in part about the mystical connections between me and Max now living on opposite sides of the planet, and the introductions of two Patron Saints into our world. Padre Pio and Maximilian Kolbe are inflection points in both our lives in and beyond these stone walls.

In science and history, an inflection point is a point at which, usually only in hindsight, an event becomes pivotal, and, once experienced, all perceptions about it change. When I could bring myself, through grace, to look beyond my fury over wrongful imprisonment, our Patron Saints became inflection points and the powers that bind us. Even my language describing this needs a background explanation. To “look beyond my fury over wrongful imprisonment” recalls vividly another “inflection point” that occurred in a dream.

I know I risk sounding a little pretentious here, but in that dream I was instructed by a nighttime visitor on October 2, the Feast of the Guardian Angels, to “look beyond the prison lights,” and when I did, my eyes were opened. I hope to return to this in a week or so in these pages when I write about the Great Patron of Justice, Saint Michael the Archangel.

Prison is not a good place. Let me put that differently. Prison is not a place where much good happens. But what good DOES happen in prison is often spectacular and it accomplishes spectacular things. One could easily dismiss those things as mere coincidence. I did just that for a long time. But a steady stream of graceful events in a place where grace seems otherwise to be entirely absent brings us back to seeing the ordinary as extraordinary. Saint Paul described such a place permeated by the light of faith: “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.” (Romans 5:20)

Convergence : St Maximilian Kolbe Lets Himself In

In my twelfth year of priesthood, I was convicted in a sham trial after refusing multiple plea deals to serve only a year or two in prison. My refusals were met with fury by Judge Arthur Brennan who ridiculed and mocked me before imposing on me a sentence that would live longer than I would live.

The numbers are important. In my twelfth year of priesthood I went to prison, and in my twelfth year in prison, I came as close as I ever had or ever will to despair. The year was 2006. The series of “accidents” leading up to this point are, in hindsight, astonishing. From seemingly out of nowhere, I was contacted by a priest who arranged with this prison’s Catholic chaplain, a deacon, to visit me, though I never understood why. In the previous 12 years, not a single priest had ventured behind these prison walls. Father James McCurry is a Conventual Franciscan priest who said only vaguely that he heard or read about me somewhere and felt compelled to reach out (or in) to me.

In the prison visiting room, his first words after shaking my hand were, “Have you ever heard of St. Maximilian Kolbe?” Fr McCurry told me that he had been the Vice Postulator for the cause of sainthood leading up to St. Maximilian’s canonization in Rome in 1982, the year I was ordained. On the twelfth anniversary of that canonization, and my ordination, Father McCurry felt compelled to visit me. The visit had to be brief.

The year was 2006. One week later, I received in the mail a letter from Father McCurry along with something that I should not have received. It was a laminated holy card depicting Maximilian in both his prison garb from Auschwitz and his Franciscan habit. I should not have received it because laminated cards had been strictly banned for security reasons then. This one, however, mysteriously made its way from the prison mail room to my cell. I was mesmerized by the image on the card. On the backside was “A Prisoner’s Prayer to St. Maximilian Kolbe.” It was about despair.

I taped the card to the top of the battered steel mirror in my cell. It was December 23, 2006. Then I realized with near despair that on that very day, I was a priest in prison one day longer than I had been a priest in freedom. I was losing myself. There is nothing here that supports in any way an identity of priesthood. The image on the mirror impacted me greatly, and painfully. It was three years before Beyond These Stone Walls would begin with my first post, “St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror.”

Months earlier, unknown to me at that time, another prisoner was dragged in chains out of years in solitary confinement in a Maine prison and shipped against his will to New Hampshire. After several weeks in “the hole” in high security housing, he arrived on the pod where I live. Walking around the pod to stake out his new turf, a very tough-looking Thai fighter stuck his head in my cell door. Upon seeing the image of Maximilian on my mirror, he stared at it for a time, and then he stared at me asking, “Is this you?”

This man had been through a lot, and was a little rough around the edges. The only part of that he might disagree with today is “a little.” He wore the wounds life had inflicted on him like a shield of armor to keep everyone else away. Everything about him spoke “dangerous,” and indeed he was at times. He had a short fuse, and that kept everyone else at a safe distance — except me.

We somehow became friends. He paid rapturous attention to the story of St. Maximilian Kolbe’s life and especially how his earthly life ended as he gave it over to the Nazis, his false accusers, to spare the life of a despairing young man. My inflection point with Saint Maximilian was this: The image on my mirror was not about all that I had lost. It was about all that I was called to become. Like Maximilian, I could not change my prison. Not one bit. I could only place it in service to my priesthood.

Saint Maximilian, in turn, led both Max and me to the Immaculata. Through his Divine Mercy Sunday conversion and his consecration to the Lord through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Pornchai Moontri took the name Maximilian. Like many in Sacred Scripture, a new name also came with a new life.

Over at our Voices from Beyond section this week, we are featuring “Mary is at Work Here” by Felix Carroll first published in Marian Helper magazine (Spring 2014). It tells the story of Mary, Maximilian, Pornchai-Max, and me, and the wonder of Divine Mercy we embraced as it also embraced us.

Out of Time and Space, Padre Pio

Our second inflection point — the point at which our spiritual fortunes changed — was Saint Padre Pio who is venerated in the Church calendar on the same date on which I was wrongly convicted and sent to prison. It is also the date Padre Pio died. This was briefly alluded to by Max in his part of this post, but I would like to expand on it a bit because I know that Max will be reading this from half a world away.

Because of the connection between Padre Pio and the date of my imprisonment, I decided to write a post about this mysterious saint. Padre Pio died in 1968 when I was fifteen years old and had just begun my return to a long neglected Catholic identity. I today cannot articulate what exactly called me to that change in such a tumultuous time as 1968. I wrote a story about the calumny and false witness Padre Pio suffered in his priesthood. It was that which I could initially most connect with. The post was titled, “Saints Alive! When Padre Pio and the Stigmata Were on Trial.” It was published in the early days of this blog.

After I wrote it, I received a rather frantic letter from the late Pierre Matthews in Belgium. Pierre learned about me from a lengthy 2005 article by Dorothy Rabinowitz in The Wall Street Journal. He and I exchanged several letters back in the few years after those articles first appeared in 2005. Pierre was alarmed about my Padre Pio post. He urgently wanted me to know that he had a personal encounter with Padre Pio when he was 15 years old.

Like many in Europe at that time, Pierre’s father had sent him to a boarding school. The school was sponsoring a train trip to a few points in Italy. When Pierre’s father learned of this, he sent Pierre a letter instructing him to take a train to a place called San Giovanni Rotondo, and go to a Capuchin Friary. Pierre was instructed to ask for a blessing from Padre Pio.

Pierre was skeptical, but did as his father asked. He took a train to San Giovanni Rotondo, and rang the bell. A friar answered the door and led young, nervous Pierre to a foyer. Pierre asked to see Padre Pio. “Impossibile!” the friar snapped back. He gave Pierre a prayer card and started to usher him back toward the door.

Just then, from a wide staircase leading to the foyer, a bearded Capuchin with bandaged hands came slowly down the stairs with eyes focused on Pierre. Padre Pio approached him while the astonished friar at the door whispered in Italian, “Do not touch his hands.” Padre Pio then placed his bandaged hands on Pierre’s head and spoke a blessing, making the Sign of the Cross.

Sixty years later, when Pierre read at Beyond These Stone Walls that Pornchai Moontri had decided to become Catholic and would enter the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010, Pierre pleaded with me to ask Pornchai to allow him to act as Godfather to sponsor his reception into the Church. Then, again, things that should not have happened did happen. Pierre could not attend a Baptism in the prison chapel so I acted as proxy. But he could arrange to visit either me or Max in the prison visiting room a few days before. Under the rules, he could be on the visiting list of only one of us. That rule was impenetrable, firmly embedded in stone.

“The worst they can say is no,” Pornchai said. So I wrote to the prison warden and explained the details. The request came back miraculously just in time. It was approved that Mr. Matthews could visit with both of us on the same day, but separately. This was, and still is, unheard of. Pierre told us both the story I told above — the story of his strange encounter with Padre Pio many years earlier.

In his visit with me, Pierre bowed his head and asked for my blessing. It was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. I placed my hand upon Pierre knowing that the spiritual imprint of Padre Pio’s blessing was still in and upon this man, and I was overwhelmed to share in it.

I do not fully understand the mystery of what happened to the angry priest who pondered prison and the fate of his priesthood, or the angry young man who pondered the deep wounds life had inflicted upon his body, mind and spirit. We are both still here, and on opposite sides of the planet now, but we are both also changed. As I am typing this, a friend sent me a letter with a brief prayer at the top. It is a parody of the Serenity Prayer, and it could now be the prayer of my priesthood:

“God, grant me
Serenity to accept the people
I cannot change,
Courage to change
the only one I can, and the
Wisdom to know
that it’s me!”

Thank you for reading these stories of our lives. May the Lord Bless you always, and keep you.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. We hope you will subscribe if you haven’t already. It’s free, and we will usually haunt your Inbox only once per week. You might also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls :

‘Mary Is at Work Here’ — a Marian Helper presentation

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized

The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe

Saints Alive! When Padre Pio and the Stigmata Were on Trial

From Arizona State University: An Interview with Our Editor

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A Special Note to our Readers: Thank you for your readership and support of this blog. As annual fees become due, Father Gordon could use your help if willing and able. Additionally, we have been notified that the National Center for Reason and Justice is ceasing operations after two decades of advocacy and sponsorship of the defense of Father MacRae and other wrongfully convicted.

For any future defense of Father MacRae it is imperative that the National Center for Reason and Justice website at ncrj.org remain active and in place. It contains volumes of crucial legal information on the Father MacRae case and must be preserved or all will be lost. We have been granted permission from the NCRJ to take over management of its site and preserve its contents. This will add to our annual operating expenses. If readers are able to help, it would be greatly appreciated.

Please see Contact and How to Help

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The Assumption of Mary and the Assent of Saint Maximilian Kolbe

In one of history’s darkest times and places, Saint Maximilian Kolbe continued his life’s greatest quest: to know, honor, and echo the assent of Mary to the Lord.

August 14, 2024 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

On November 1, 1950, Pope Pius XII solemnly defined as a dogma of faith the bodily Assumption into Heaven of Mary, the Mother of Jesus. The precise words of Pope Pius are found in the Apostolic Constitution, Munificentissimus Deus, “The Most Bountiful God,” defining what much of the Church already believed, and now holds as a matter of truth:

“We pronounce, declare and define it to be a divinely revealed truth that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”

It was not without controversy. Pius XII thus became the first pope in a century to define a new dogma of faith. Five papacies earlier, in 1869, Pope Pius IX sought, cajoled, and in the end imposed, the doctrine of papal infallibility. In his book, Making Saints, former Newsweek editor Kenneth Woodward described the doctrine of infallibility as a “sheathed sword” (Making Saints, p. 314). He described it that way because, from the time of the doctrine’s inception in 1869, a declaration of papal infallibility has only been invoked once: a century later in 1950 when Pius XII declared the Assumption of Mary to be an infallible tenet of faith.

This was not just a unilateral pronouncement from on high. Before defining the dogma in 1950, Pius XII sought and received an amazing response of affirmation from the “sensus fidelium,” the assent of the faithful from throughout the world. The Our Sunday Visitor Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine describes this beautifully:

“Infallibility in belief pertains to the whole Church. ‘The whole body of the faithful … cannot err in matters of belief. This characteristic is shown in the supernatural appreciation of the faith (the ‘sensus fidei’) of the whole people when, from the bishops to the last of the faithful, they manifest a universal consent to matters of faith and morals.” (Lumen Gentium)

“To understand properly how the whole people of God is infallible in its sense of the faith (sensus fidei, sensus fidelium) it must be born in mind that the body of the faithful goes beyond limits both of place and, especially, of time. The People of God always includes those of past generations as well as those in the present moment. The former are in fact the vast majority, and it is easier to ascertain what they believed. It is that belief that marks the sensus fidelium and points infallibly to the truth." (p. 334)

To help in understanding this concept of the Universal Church that includes the faith of all generations past, see my post, “The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead” (linked again at the end of
this post). It is evidence of the ongoing connectedness of the faithful departed to the life of the Church.

I found this concept to be a stunning affirmation, not only of what we believe, but of why we believe it. The idea that infallibility includes the unwavering faith of the vast majority of the People of God taken as a whole over the span of millennia is mind-boggling truth.

The faith of the entire Church, from its birth at Pentecost to the present, points to a belief in Mary as Theotokos, the Bearer of God and the New Ark of the Covenant. Pope Pius XII strongly considered this before defining as infallible the Dogma of the Assumption in 1950. From the Chair of Peter, Pius XII sought the assent of the faithful in the present through his encyclical, Deiperae Virginis Mariae, to inquire whether Mary’s bodily Assumption should be defined.

As a result, an amazing number of petitions reached Rome from every corner of the Church. The petitions included those of 8,000,000 laity, 50,000 religious women, 32,000 priests, 2,505 archbishops and bishops, 311 cardinals, and 81 patriarchs of the Eastern Church. If this demonstration of assent had been able to span the entire life of the Church the result would have been immeasurable.

From the earliest days of the Church many considered the Assumption of Mary — centuries before it was defined as a tenet of faith — to be, in the words of Pius XII, “the fulfillment of that most perfect grace granted to the Blessed Virgin and the special blessing that countered the curse of Eve” — original sin. In the Eastern Church, a “Memorial of Mary” was already being celebrated on August 15 in the Fifth Century. It spread from the East and came ot be known as the koimesis in Greek and the dormitio in Latin, both of which mean the “falling asleep.” By the Eighth Century, belief in the bodily Assumption of Mary was widely accepted in both the East and West.

In the 19th Century, John Henry Cardinal Newman wrote that both the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary are implicit in her identification as the “New Eve,” a title given to Mary since the Second Century. Just as the Resurrection of Jesus was the essential element of His victory over sin and death, Mary shares that victory in her designation as the New Eve, and in the words of Jesus at the foot of the Cross as the spiritual Mother of all. Seeing His Mother at the foot of the Cross, Jesus said ot her, “Woman, behold your son.” And then to the Disciple John, “Behold your Mother.” It was an adoption arrangement (John 19:26-27).

Among the earliest titles of Mary is Theotokos, Greek for “The Bearer of God.” For the Scriptural foundation of this belief and its implications, see my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

“What Will Become of You?”

In the Gospel account of the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:2), Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus at Mount Tabor. Both Moses and Elijah, according to Scripture, entered heaven in both body and soul. The appearances of Mary at Fatima, Lourdes, Tepeyac Hill in Mexico, and others all point to an understanding of Mary as existing still in that same form. I wrote of the details of one of these visits in “A Subtle Encore from Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

There is no saint of modern times with a stronger and more dedicated devotion ot Mary than Saint Maximilian Kolbe who seemed to live with a perpetual presence of the Immaculata in his field of view. Long before he was the Saint of Auschwitz and Founder of the Militia Immaculata, Saint Maximilian Kolbe was simply “Raymond,” a highly intelligent and gifted boy born into poverty in a rural farming community in Poland.

Like me, Raymond Kolbe was fascinated by the sciences of astronomy and cosmology and actually once built a working rocket as a boy. Also like me, he exasperated his mother at times. One day his frustrated mother scolded him, “Raymond! Whatever will become of you?” Filled with grief, young Kolbe went immediately to a local church and turned to the Mother of God with the same question. According to Kolbe’s own words as reported by my friend, Father Michael Gaitley, MIC in his wonderful book, 33 Days to Morning Glory,

“Then the virgin appeared to me holding in her hands two crowns, one white and one red. She looked at me with love and she asked me if I would like to have them. The white meant that I would remain pure, and the red meant that I would be a martyr. I answered, ‘yes, I want them.’ Then she looked at me tenderly and disappeared.”

Father Gaitley went on to describe that what was meant by “pure” in this sense was that Kolbe would never allow evil or dishonesty to take root in his heart. And it never did. On August 14, the date this is posted, the Church honors Saint Maximilian Kolbe. He also happens to be my own Patron Saint as well as that of my friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri, and the Patron Saint of this blog. To the best of our ability, we follow in his spiritual footsteps, but his footsteps took him to an ultimate sacrifice. The nature of that sacrifice, along with Maximilian’s Auschwitz prison number 16670, now a badge of honor, is expressed on Pornchai’s T-shirt atop this section of our post. Our friend, Father Michael Gaitley, MIC, described the footsteps of Saint Maximilian in brief but familiar prose in 33 Days to Morning Glory :

“In 1941, after decades of incredibly fruitful apostolic labors in Poland and Japan, Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Before his arrest, his brother Franciscans had pleaded with him to go into hiding. He said he was grateful for their loving hearts but couldn’t follow their advice.

“He later explained why: ‘I have a mission to fulfill.’ That mission was fulfilled on the eve of the Feast of Mary’s Assumption into Heaven when, after he volunteered to take the place of another prisoner condemned to starvation, the impatient Nazis finished Kolbe off with a lethal injection. Thus, St. Maximilian died a martyr of charity and received the red crown from his Immaculata.”

Two hours before his arrest, Fr. Maximilian Kolbe penned what Father Gaitley called “the single most important theological reflection of his life. It was nothing less than the answer to a question that eluded him for many years, the question he had pondered over and over throughout his life was: “Who are you, O Immaculate Conception?”

In the document, according to Father Gaitley, Kolbe raised a key point. In the appearances of Mary at Lourdes, Mary did not say to St. Bernadette, “I am immaculately conceived,” but rather she said, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” It was thus clarified for Maximilian that through a special grace from God, Mary was in fact immaculately conceived in the womb of her own mother with no stain of original sin and that grace became her very identity by the as yet unseen merits of her Son. Understanding this means stepping out of conventional time and space for a moment into the mystery of the “nunc stans” the "Eternal Now" in which God dwells and in which He envisions all time and space as one. It is a difficult concept for our linear existence to ponder, but I have pondered it for my entire life.

Father Gaitley asks (p. 52): “Why does Mary make the grace she received at her conception her very name?” Clearly, Mary is not a divine being. Kolbe wrestled with this divinity problem for decades, and it ultimately led to a solution.

There are two Immaculate Conceptions, one created (Mary) and the other uncreated (the Holy Spirit). Before Mary, there was the uncreated Immaculate Conception, “the One Who for all eternity springs from God the Father and God the Son as an uncreated conception of love, the prototype of all conceptions that multiply life throughout the universe. The Father begets, the Son is begotten, the Spirit is the 'conception' that springs from their love. The Holy Spirit is the “Immaculate Conception” b e c a u s e, being God, He is without sin.

Is Mary then a personification of the Holy Spirit? The truth of this union between the Holy Spirit and Mary is found in a somewhat difficult passage in Maximilian’s own writings as reported by Father Gaitley:

"What type of union is this? It is above all an interior union, a union of her essence with the ‘essence’ of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit dwells in her, lives in her. This was true from the first instant of her existence. It was always true; it will always be true.” ( Gaitley, p. 53)

“In what does this life of the Spirit in Mary consist? He himself is uncreated Love in her; the Love of the Father and of the Son, the Love by which God loves Himself, the very Love of the Most Holy Trinity ... . In a much more precise, more interior, more essential manner, the Holy Spirit lives in the soul of the Immaculata, in the depths of her very being” (Gaitley, p. 53-54)

"My soul magnifies the Lord, and my Spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, henceforth all generations shall call me
blessed.”

— From the Magnificat of Mary, Luke 1:46-48

In “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God,” I explored a similar Marian theology, and from it I think I can finally make sense of what Saint Maximilian has proposed. Mary, Theotokos , the Bearer of God, is an eternal repository of the Holy Spirit. Both my friend Pornchai Maximilian Moontri and I owe her a great debt — not for saving us from Earthly Powers of destruction, because they actually mean little, but for preserving us in faith despite them.

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“Remember that those who ask for Heaven of the Immaculata will surely achieve it because she is unable to deny us anything nor is the Lord God able to deny her anything. We shall shortly know exactly what it will be like in Heaven. Surely in a hundred years none of us will be walking on this Earth. But what are a hundred years in the face of what we have been through? Soon, therefore, provided we are well prepared under the protection of the Immaculata.”

— St. Maximilian Kolbe, 1941

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Please spend some time in prayer and thanksgiving at the live feed of Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s own Adoration Chapel featured below after all our posts at Beyond These Stone Walls.

You may also like these related posts:

The God of the Living and the Life of the Dead

The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God

Maximilian Kolbe: The Other Prisoner Priest in My Cell

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free

January 2021: In the last days of President Trump’s first term in office, a petition by Catholic League President Bill Donohue led to Pornchai Moontri’s freedom.

July 31, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

This post has been a long time in the making. It’s the result of an epiphany, a sudden realization of truth that radically changed my perception of what had previously been to me just a painful memory. Then I stumbled upon something entirely new. To convey this thunderous awakening, I have to first ask you to return with me to a time not long ago that was painful and confusing for us all: the rise of the Covid pandemic of 2020 and 2021. The virus, the masks, the closures, the lies, the “mostly peaceful” protests that were actually riots, the burning cities each night on the news, it was all just awful.

Then there was Covid itself. I had it twice, the first time in the month after my friend, Pornchai “Max” Moontri, was taken away in the custody of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, after 36 years in America and 15 years as my roommate. Prisons are not known for having empathy about the human side of things. There was not a single concern about what happens to Pornchai or where I go from there. For over 15 years Max lived in the bunk above me where we were engaged in an epic spiritual battle to reconcile his past and secure a future. Then at 0700 on the morning of September 8, 2020, he was gone. By 0900, a stranger was living in his place.

And as I struggled to regain my sense of autonomy and balance, dark forces chose that very moment to bring down this blog. The only means I had to communicate with the outside world. I had to set all this aside to focus my meager resources and attention on the biggest crisis at hand: how to help Max cope with the hellish vortex of being lost in ICE detention with little hope and no means to communicate at all.

I seem to never learn to trust, however. I instinctively lean back on to my own resources and rely on no one else. That was certainly not working and it was not going to work. Then our late friend Claire Dion revealed an ingenious plan. Pornchai Max and I could not call each other, but we both could call Claire. She cared very much for us, and being a retired RN, she put her ingenuity to work. She devised a plan that I described not long after her death from cancer this year. That post was “Claire Dion Has Fallen into the Hands of the Living God.” Here is our treasured photo of how Claire put us back together.

The ICE Follies

As you know, Pornchai Moontri was taken from Thailand at age 11 in 1985 and brought to America. This forced him into a devastating and traumatic life from which there was but one escape. So he fled from it, again and again, the last time leaving him all alone in this world, a homeless teen at age 14 in a foreign country with a language and customs he could not comprehend.

Fleeing the trauma of exploitation, Pornchai fell into life on the streets where he trusted no one. He would steal food to survive, and sleep in doorways, shelters, and sometimes on the floor in the home of a friend. One day he stole a few cans of beer from a store. Fleeing across the store parking lot in 1992, Pornchai was tackled and pinned down by a much larger man. He could not be in that situation again. He could not be someone’s victim. He snapped, and that man died over a few cans of beer.

Ironically, just as I began typing this post I received a message from “Melissa.” Nearly 40 years ago at age 12 she had been a classmate of Pornchai in the seventh grade in middle school in Bangor, Maine when he first arrived in the United States. Melissa’s comment was both caring and brave, and it struck me that the trauma to which Pornchai was subjected has echoes all around him and across the years. Here is an excerpt of Melissa’s comment:

“I met Pornchai in seventh grade. I remember him as a sweet boy who was always smiling. However, a ‘foreigner’ he was not going to be accepted into the ‘in crowd’ though I don’t recall anyone that didn’t like him. How could they not? He had a great disposition … . I was upset to learn of Pornchai’s arrest back in 1992 because I knew the kid never stood a chance. We had all heard about the abusive home in Bangor. Over the years I would check to see if he had yet been released and was infuriated to learn that he had not. He had stolen beer, was chased into the parking lot by a grown man who confronted him. Pornchai reacted as the scared, cornered boy that he was. It was a tragedy for both. However, this boy, barely a legal adult, was locked up and forgotten. His American dream was a living nightmare. He became Bangor’s forgotten son. America, Bangor, Penobscot County Courts, DCF, teachers … . We all failed him.”

Years later, Pornchai emerged from over a decade in solitary confinement. Then our lives converged, clearly by design. I drew the entire story of his life out of Pornchai including all the madness that had been inflicted upon him.

What sparked me to write this post in 2024 was something that I did not know until very recently. I stumbled upon a plea from Catholic League President Bill Donohue addressed to the White House in 2021 in the final days of President Donald Trump’s first term in office. Dr. Donohue published this petition in the January 2021 issue of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League, under title “White House Petitioned on ICE Detainee”:

We took up a very serious case at Christmastime, hoping to bring relief to a man who has paid his dues and has been through enough. We asked Catholics to appeal to President Donald Trump to release Pornchai Moontri from the custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He deserves to be repatriated to Thailand.

We were encouraged by news that the embassy in Thailand was contacted by ICE just days after we made our request; Pornchai’s case showed movement for the first time.  Right before Christmas we asked our email subscribers to redouble their efforts making one more push.

Bill Donohue has known of the plight of Pornchai for many years. It was Fr. Gordon J. MacRae — he is another victim of injustice — who brought Pornchai’s story to his attention. Pornchai rightly credits Fr. MacRae with mentoring him. More than that, MacRae brought him into the Catholic Church.

We explained why Pornchai deserves to be released.

Pornchai was born in Thailand in 1973 and was abandoned by his mother when he was two-years-old. She intended to sell him, but a young relative came to his rescue and brought him into his home. When he was 11-years-old his mother reemerged with a new husband; they took him to Bangor, Maine, against his will. His stepfather, Richard Bailey, immediately started raping him, and did so for three years. At age 14, Pornchai escaped (it was his second escape) and became homeless. When he was 18, he got into a fight with a much bigger man while he was intoxicated and took the man’s life during the struggle (he was so drunk he does not recall stabbing him).

While awaiting trial, Pornchai’s mother came to visit him in jail, warning him that if he disclosed to the authorities what his stepfather did to him, she would suffer the consequences. Fearing for his mother’s life, he prudently decided not to speak, even to the point of not defending himself in court. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Maine has no parole.

In 2000, his mother attempted to leave her husband; they were living in Guam. That is where she was beaten to death. The only suspect was her husband, but there was no evidence to convict him. Subsequently, many things changed.

In 2005, Pornchai was sent to a New Hampshire State Prison. That is where he met Fr. MacRae. Five years later, Pornchai became a Catholic; he soon became a fan of the Catholic League.

In 2018, after new evidence emerged — advocates for Pornchai pursued Bailey — and justice was finally done. Bailey was convicted on forty felony counts of child sexual abuse against Pornchai.

On September 11, 2020, Pornchai, after serving his full sentence, was released at age 47 to the custody of ICE for deportation to his native Thailand. He is still in custody, with no end in sight.

Pornchai has served his time and has suffered enough. He should now be set free.

— William Donohue, PhD, Catalyst, January 2021

A White House Intervention

When Bill Donohue published the above, and Catholic League members sent it to the White House, Pornchai had already been held by ICE in an ICE detention facility in Gena, Louisiana for five months. It was the peak of Covid contagion and he was living 70 to a room with no protection and lights blazing around the clock. Despite my daily assurances that we were working hard to get him out, he was showing signs of extreme stress and depression. While I was shielding Pornchai from false hopes and promises, I was unaware that others were also shielding me about their own efforts. I thought I was a lone ranger doing my best each day to reach out to anyone who would take a call from a prisoner — and they were few — to plea for relief from Pornchai’s plight. The Covid pandemic had the world locked tightly in its grip and the riots across America were evidence of how tightly wound our world had become. Pornchai believed that he would remain trapped in ICE until the Covid crisis was over and that could take years. So in the meantime, I asked Pornchai to try to reach out to others who were also trapped in ICE, but even less fortunate than himself. He did exactly that, and ended up saving 17-year-old Trepha, a Vietnamese teen who ended up in the same ICE facility as Pornchai, but surrounded mostly by young men from Latin America. Trepha had stowed away on a container ship departing Vietnam and then his unplanned world tour ended in Mexico.

Smugglers took what little money Trepha had saved and then led him across the Rio Grande and locked him in the trunk of an abandoned car. When Border Patrol agents found him, they made no distinction between migrants from Latin American countries and those who had come from abroad. Pornchai protected Trepha by keeping him away from the Central American gangs at Gena and then tasked me with reaching out to the Vietnamese Consulate to try to get Trepha returned home. I still hear from him on occasion. He is back in Vietnam with his grandmother and has promised me that he would not undertake any more world tours. In December 2020 we posted “An Open and Urgent Letter to President Donald Trump” asking for an intervention to move Pornchai’s relocation along despite the Covid pandemic and its international restrictions. What I did not know at the time I wrote that post was that Catholic League President Bill Donohue also reached out to the White House greatly magnifying our voice.

I learned of this only recently, three years later in 2024. I stumbled upon some fascinating paperwork from my friend Fr George David Byers in North Carolina who had been helping me then behind the scenes in this blog. Father George printed a few pages of a BTSW traffic report showing visitors to this site and what they were seeing in December 2020 and January 2021. I did not make much sense of it then, so I just put it aside out of sight and out of mind. Three years passed and I discovered it again just weeks ago. I could see that many of the site views were from ICE Headquarters in New Orleans and then in January 2021 from Homeland Security in Washington and then finally from the White House. This was the culmination of the interest of thousands of Catholic League members who intervened to assist Pornchai Moontri.

Then, upon discovering the above, I went to the prison law library where I work. I keep there a collection of the many issues of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. I began to look through them, and then found one breathlessly in the January 2021 edition entitled “White House Petitioned on ICE Detainee.”

It did not just move the needle, it moved a mountain. Just two weeks after its publication Pornchai was aboard a Korean Airlines flight bound for Seoul along two plainclothes ICE officers who accompanied him. From there they boarded a connecting flight to Bangkok. The flight was 23 hours.

It turned out that the ICE officers read a good deal about Pornchai and as a result treated him very well. In fact, they saved the day. Upon their arrival after midnight in the Customs area at Bangkok International Airport, an exhausted Pornchai found himself surrounded by Thai police who were waiting for him. They demanded to know why he was being deported from the United States. The two ICE officers quickly intervened telling Pornchai not to answer. The ICE officers said that Pornchai had done nothing wrong, that he was being repatriated to his native country in cooperation with the Thai government and was entirely a free man. The Thai police went silent. Pornchai had never seen anything like it. Much later Pornchai wrote of his arrival in “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!”

Pornchai learned from me this week that Catholic League President Bill Donohue, and likely also then-President Donald Trump, were instrumental in a worldwide effort to restore him to freedom. He marveled at this, and so do I. “The Hand of God was on them both,” I told him, “and on you as well.”

“I could not see that then,” said Pornchai, “it took a priest and two presidents, but I see it now.”

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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Catholic League President Bill Donohue has a riveting and timely new book that I hope to soon review in these pages. It is Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights is the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization defending individual Catholics and the Church against defamation. No one in the U.S. Catholic Church has done more to assist me and Pornchai Moontri than Catholic League President Bill Donohue. Join forces with us at www.CatholicLeague.org.

You may also like these related posts:

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

Untying the Knots of Sin in Prison by Marie Meaney

Free at Last Thanks to God and You! by Pornchai Moontri

On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized by Pornchai Moontri

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”